On the Run: Wanted Men in a

Philadelphia Ghetto
Alice Goffman
Princeton University

Although recent increases in imprisonment are concentrated in poor Black communities,

we know little about how daily life within these neighborhoods is affected. Almost all
ethnographic work in poor minority neighborhoods was written before the expansion of
the criminal justice system, and the bulk of research on mass imprisonment relies on
survey data, field experiments, or interviews, conceptualizing its impact in terms of
current or former felons and their families. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in
Philadelphia, this article shifts the focus from imprisonment and criminal records to the
increase in policing and supervision in poor Black neighborhoods, and what this has
meant for a growing status group of wanted people. For many young men, avoiding jail
has become a daily preoccupation: they have warrants out for minor infractions, like
failing to pay court fees or breaking curfew, and will be detained if they are identified.
Such threat of imprisonment transforms social relations by undermining already tenuous
attachments to family, work, and community. But young men also rely on their precarious
legal standing to explain failures that would have occurred anyway, while girlfriends and
neighbors exploit their wanted status as an instrument of social control. I discuss the
implications of my ethnographic observations relative to prior treatments of the poor and
policing, and with regard to broader sociological questions about punishment and
surveillance in the modern era.

he number of people incarcerated in the

United States has grown seven times over
the past 40 years, and this growth has been concentrated among Black men with little education (Garland 2001; Western 2006). For Black
men in recent birth cohorts, the experience of
incarceration is now typical: 30 percent of those
with only high school diplomas have been to

Direct cor respondence to Alice Goffman,

Department of Sociology, Wallace Hall, Princeton
University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (agoffman@princeton.edu). I thank Mitchell Duneier for invaluable
support and guidance. Also in Princeton, I am grateful to Viviana Zelizer, Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager,
Bruce Western, and Marvin Bressler. ASR coeditor
Vincent Roscigno, Howard Becker, Philip Kasinitz,
Jack Katz, William Labov, Steven Lopez, Gillian
Sankoff, Harvey Molotch, Colin Jerolmack, John
Sutton, and the anonymous reviewers gave outstanding suggestions.

prison, and 60 percent of those who did not

finish high school have prison records by their
mid-30s (Pettit and Western 2004). One in four
Black children born in 1990 had a father imprisoned (Wildeman 2009). Such mass imprisonment (Garland 2001) transmits social and
economic disadvantage, to be sure. African
American former felons face significant discrimination in the labor market, as well as health
costs, obstacles to housing, and large-scale disenfranchisement (Hammett, Harmon, and
Rhodes 2002; Pager 2007; Rubenstein and
Mukamal 2002; Uggen and Manza 2002;
Western 2006). Moreover, imprisoned and formerly imprisoned men have difficulties participating in sustained ways in the lives of their
families (see Nurse 2002; Western, Lopoo, and
McLanahan 2004). Their partners and children
consequently become socially and economically disadvantaged in the process (for reviews,

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2009, VOL. 74 (June:339357)

340AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

see Comfort 2007; Hagan and Dinovitzer

1999).1
Expansions in incarceration have been
accompanied by increases in policing and
supervision in poor communities. While the
police were scarcely present in the ghetto
decades ago, today, police helicopters can regularly be heard overhead, cameras now monitor
people on the streets, and large numbers of
young menincluding many who have never
been convicted of felonieshave pending cases
in the criminal courts, are on probation, released
on bail, issued low-level warrants, and are routinely chased, searched, questioned, and arrested by the police. How does this affect daily life
in poor Black communities? Unfortunately, we
know little in this regard. Indeed, much of the
research literature, which relies on statistical
data, field experiments, or interviews, most
often centers on the consequences of going to
prison. Although ethnographic accounts should
arguably capture what enhanced policing and
supervision has meant for the dynamics of daily
life in poor minority communities, most ethnographies were written before the criminal justice system became such a prevalent institution
in the lives of the poor (see, e.g., Anderson
1978; Liebow 1967; Stack 1974).2
This article, building on prior work pertaining to the urban poor, as well as broader conceptions of power in the modern era (e.g.,
Foucault 1979), draws on six years of fieldwork with a group of poor African American
young men in Philadelphia. In doing so, it offers
an extended ethnographic look at life in the
policed and surveilled ghetto that has taken
shape in the era of mass imprisonment. As the

1 Although this body of research points overwhelmingly to the detrimental effects of incarceration and its aftermath, this picture is complicated by
close-up accounts of prisoners and their families.
Comfort (2008) shows how women visiting incarcerated spouses find that the prisons regulations in
some ways enhance their relationships. As romantic
partners, inmates contrast favorably to free men.
2 Ethnographies of ghetto life published more
recently rely on fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and
early 1990s, before the change in policing practices
and crime laws took their full effect (see, e.g.,
Anderson 1999; Bourgois 1995; Venkatesh 2006;
Wacquant 2004; for exceptions, see Jacobs 1999;
LeBlanc 2003).

findings reveal, the dealings these young men

have with the police, the courts, and the probation and parole board grant them an illegal or
semilegal status and instill an overriding fear of
capture. Suspicious even of those closest to
them, young men cultivate unpredictability or
altogether avoid institutions, places, and relations on which they formerly relied. Yet because
being wanted is understood to be deeply constraining, it can, within the context of limited
opportunity, serve as an excuse for obligations
that may have gone unfulfilled anyway. The
result is a complex interactive system in which
ghetto residents become caught in constraining
legal entanglements while simultaneously calling on the criminal justice system to achieve a
measure of power over one another in their daily
lives.
THE URBAN POOR AND POLICING
Ethnographic accounts of poor urban communities have long included descriptions of people who commit serious crimes, stand trial, go
to jail, or find themselves on the run from the
police (see, e.g., Anderson 1978; Liebow 1967).
Until recently, these people comprised only a
small group of criminals in a neighborhood:
most residents of poor Black communities did
not interact much with the authorities. Before
the 1990s, in fact, the ghetto was frequently
described as nearly abandoned by law enforcement.
Anderson (1978:2), writing about street-corner men in Chicago in the early 1970s (he
devotes a whole chapter to hoodlums), reports
that the police glance over and slow down, but
they seldom stop and do anything. Ordinarily
they casually move on, leaving the street-corner
men to settle their own differences. Venkateshs
(2008) description of the Chicago projects some
20 years later depicts a similar scene, noting that
police simply do not come when called. Instead,
gang leaders step in and maintain an informal,
de facto system of justice with the help of project leaders and a few neighborhood cops. In
Crack House, Williams (1992:84) likewise
describes how, in New York during the late
1980s and early 1990s at the peak of the crack
boom, police typically did not disturb open air
crack sales:
The police have firm knowledge about selling
spots, but they usually ignore the spots until com-

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO341

munity pressure builds to a level that forces them

to take action.|.|.|. For the most part, the police
stay away.|.|.|. One night I watched a police car, with
lights flashing, move down this street past hundreds
of buyers, runners, touts, and dealers marching
by continually making exchanges. Over the cars
loudspeaker an officer kept saying, Move on off
the block everybody. This is the police. The buyers and sellers paid no attention.

Times, however, have changed. The past few

decades have seen the war on crime, the war on
drugs, a blossoming of federal and state police
agencies and bureaus, steeper sentencing laws,
and a near unified endorsement of zero-tolerance policies from police and civic leaders
(Beckett 1997; Simon 2007). The number of
police officers per capita increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century in
cities across the United States (Reiss 1992). In
2006, more than 14 million people were arrested and charged with a criminal offense in the
United States, and more than five million people were under probation or parole supervision
(Glaze and Bonzcar 2006; U.S. Department of
Justice 2007).
In Philadelphiamy field sitethe number
of police officers increased by 69 percent
between 1960 and 2000, from 2.76 officers for
every 1,000 citizens to 4.66 officers.3 The
Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole
Department supervised more than 60,000 people in 2006. These people paid the city more
than 10 million dollars in restitution, fines,
court costs, and supervisory fees that year. In
Philadelphia, 12,000 people violated the terms
of their probation or parole and were issued
warrants for their arrest (Philadelphia Adult
Probation and Parole Department 2007). Even
more people were issued bench warrants for
missing court or for unpaid court fees, or arrest
warrants for failure to turn themselves in for a
crime. Such surveillance, policing, and supervision raise important sociological questions
about the role of the state in managing poverty
and maintaining racial inequality (Wacquant
2001). They also raise questions about the nature

Data on the number of police off icers in

Philadelphia is taken from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports (1960 through
2000). Population estimates of Philadelphia are taken
from the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

and consequences of modern surveillance and

power.
Foucault (1979) suggested that the modern
era would increasingly be characterized by surveillance and that state monitoring of citizens
would become increasingly complete. Building
on ethnographic insights, my conclusions highlight ways in which contemporary surveillance
may indeed be taking the forms Foucault
described in his analysis of panoptic power. Yet
my conclusions also suggest that the consequences of such surveillance for everyday life
may differ from those envisioned by Foucault.
Rather than encouraging self-monitoring, the
forms of supervision and policing found in the
neighborhood I observed foster a climate of
fear and suspicion in which people are pressured
to inform on one another. Young men do not live
as well-disciplined subjects, but as suspects and
fugitives, with the daily fear of confinement.
FIELDWORK, THE 6TH STREET
BOYS, AND NEIGHBORHOOD
CONTEXT
When I was an undergraduate at the University
of Pennsylvania, I tutored a high school student,
Aisha (names of people and streets are fictitious). I began to get to know some of her friends
and neighbors, and in the fall of 2002 I moved
into an apartment in the poor to working-class
Black neighborhood in which she lived. At this
point, Aishas mother had begun referring to
me as her other daughter and Aisha and I
became sisters (Anderson 1978; Stack 1974).
When Aishas cousin Ronny, age 15, came home
from a juvenile detention center, Aisha and I
started hanging out with him in a neighborhood about 10 minutes away called 6th Street.
Ronny introduced me to Mike, who was 21, a
year older than I was. When Mikes best friend
Chuck, age 18, came home from county jail, we
began hanging out with him too.
When I first started spending time with
Ronny and Mike on 6th Street, their neighbors
and relatives remarked on my whiteness and
asked me to account for my presence. Ronny
introduced me as Aishas sister, and I mentioned that I lived nearby. After a few months,
Mike decided to take me under his wing and
began referring to me as sis. Bit by bit, other
young men in the group started introducing me

342AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

to others as their cousin or as a homie who

goes way back.
The five blocks known as 6th Street are 93
percent Black, according to a survey of residents
that Chuck and I conducted in 2007. At the
busiest intersection, men and boys stand outside
offering bootleg CDs and DVDs, stolen goods,
and food to drivers and passersby. The main
commercial street includes a bullet-proofed
Chinese food store selling fried chicken wings,
loosie cigarettes, condoms, baby food, and
glassines for smoking crack. The street also
includes a check-cashing store, hair dresser,
payday loan store, Crown Fried Chicken restaurant, and a pawnshop. On the next block, a
Puerto Rican family runs a corner grocery.
Of the 217 households surveyed, roughly one
fourth received housing vouchers. In all but
two households, members reported receiving
some type of government assistance in the past
three years. The neighborhood also contains
many people who make their living as teachers,
bus drivers, parole officers, health care workers, and so on. Aishas neighbors commonly
referred to the area of 6th Street as nice and
quiet, and a place they would move if they had
enough money.
Chuck, Mike, and Ronny were part of a loose
group of about 15 young men who grew up
around 6th Street and were joined by the fact that
they were, for the most part, unemployed and
trying to make it outside of the formal economy. They occasionally referred to their group as
the 6th Street Boys when distinguishing themselves from other street-corner groups, and five
of them had 6th Street tattooed on their arms.
Among the 15 young men, eight were 18 or 19
years old when I met them, four were in their
early 20s, and one was age 23. Ronny was 14
and Reggie was 15. Six years later, Mike was
the only one to have graduated from high school.
Alex worked steadily in his fathers heating and
air-conditioning repair shop, and four others
occasionally found seasonal construction jobs
or low-skilled jobs at places like Taco Bell and
McDonalds. By 2002, the crack trade was in
decline, as it was in other parts of the country
(Jacobs 1999). Seven of the young men worked
intermittently as low-level crack dealers; others
sold marijuana, Wet (PCP and/or embalming
fluid), or pills like Xanax. Some of the men
occasionally made money by robbing other drug

dealers. One earned his keep by exotic dancing

and offering sex to women.
All but two of the young men lived with
female relatives, although about half got evicted and slept on other peoples couches or on the
streets for months or years at a time. Anthony
slept in an abandoned truck on 6th Street for
most of the time I knew him, although Chuck
later let him sleep in his basement or got the
women he was seeing to let Anthony sleep on
the floor when Chuck spent the night.
Between January 2002 and August 2003, I
conducted intensive observation on the block,
spending most of my waking hours hanging out
on Chucks back porch steps, or along the alley
way between his block and Mikes block, or on
the corner across from the convenience store. In
the colder months, we were usually indoors at
Chucks and a few other houses in the area. I also
went along to lawyers offices, court, the probation and parole office, the hospital, and local
bars and parties. By 2004, some of the young
men were in county jails and state prisons; for
the next four years I spent between two and six
days a week on 6th street and roughly one day
a week visiting members of the group in jail and
prison. I also kept in touch by phone and through
letters.
The young men agreed to let me take field
notes for the purpose of one day publishing the
material, but I generally did not ask direct questions and most of what is contained here comes
from observations I made or conversations I
heard.4 Over the course of this research I also
interviewed two lawyers, a district attorney,
three probation officers, two police officers,
and a federal district court judge.
ON BEING WANTED
By 2002, curfews were established around 6th
Street for those under age 18 and video cameras
had been placed on major streets. During the

4 I use quotes when I wrote down what people said

as they spoke (by typing it directly onto a laptop or
by using a cell phone text message). I omit the quotes
when I noted what people said after an event or conversation, and I paraphrase when I wrote down what
people said at the end of the day in my field notes.
Since I did not use a tape recorder, even the speech
in quotes should be taken only as a close approximation.

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO343

first year and a half of fieldwork, I watched

the police stop pedestrians or people in cars,
search them, run their names to see if any warrants came up, ask them to come in for questioning, or make an arrest at least once a day,
with five exceptions. I watched the police break
down doors, search houses, and question, arrest,
or chase suspects through houses 52 times.
Police helicopters circled overhead and beamed
search lights onto local streets nine times. I
noted blocks taped off and traffic redirected as
police searched for evidence or secured a crime
scene 17 times. I watched the police punch,
choke, kick, stomp on, or beat young men with
night sticks 14 times during this first year and
a half.
Children learn at an early age to watch out for
the police and to prepare to run. The first week
I spent on 6th Street, I saw two boys, 5 and 7
years old, play a game of chase in which one
assumed the role of the cop who must run after
the other. When the cop caught up to the other
child, he pushed him down and cuffed him with
imaginary handcuffs. He patted the other child
down and felt in his pockets, asking if he had
warrants or was carrying a gun or any drugs. The
child then took a quarter out of the other childs
pocket, laughing and yelling, Im seizing that!
In the following months, I saw children give up
running and simply stick their hands behind
their backs, as if in handcuffs, or push their
bodies up against a car, or lie flat on the ground
and put their hands over their head. The children
yelled, Im going to lock you up! Im going to
lock you up, and you aint never coming home.
I once saw a 6-year-old child pull another childs
pants down and try to do a cavity search.
When Chuck, Mike, and Steve assembled
outside, the first topic of the day was frequently who had been taken into custody the night
before and who had outrun the cops and gotten
away. They discussed how the police identified
and located the person, what the charges were
likely to be, what physical harm had been done
to the man as he was caught and arrested, and
what property the police had taken and what had
been wrecked or lost during the chase.
People with warrants out for their arrest for
failure to turn themselves in when accused of a
crime understand that the police may employ a
number of strategies in attempting to locate
them. In an interview, two police officers
explained that when they are looking for a sus-

pect, they access Social Security records, court

records, hospital admission records, electric
and gas bills, and employment records. They
visit a suspects usual haunts (e.g., his home,
his workplace, and his street corner) at the times
he is likely to be there, threatening his family
or friends with arrest, particularly when they
have their own lower-level warrants or are on
probation or have a pending court case. The
police also use a sophisticated computer mapping program that tracks people who have warrants or are on probation, parole, or released on
bail. The police round up these potential informants and threaten them with jail time if they do
not provide information about the suspect they
are looking for.
In the 6th Street neighborhood, a person was
occasionally on the run because he was a suspect in a shooting or robbery, but most people
around 6th Street had warrants out for far more
minor infractions. In the survey that Chuck and
I conducted in 2007, of the 217 households that
make up the 6th Street neighborhood, we found
308 men between the ages of 18 and 30 in residence.5 Of these men, 144 reported that they
had a warrant issued for their arrest because of
either delinquencies with court fines and fees
or for failure to appear for a court date within
the past three years. Also within the past three
years, warrants had been issued to 119 men for
technical violations of their probation or parole
(e.g., drinking or breaking curfew).6

5 I counted men who lived in a house for three days

a week or more (by their own estimates and in some

cases, my knowledge) as members of the household.
I included men who were absent because they were
in the military, at job training programs (like
JobCorp), or away in jail, prison, drug rehab centers,
or halfway houses, if they expected to return to the
house and had been living in the house before they
went away.
6 These violations are not the same as the disorderly conduct that became the focus of quality of
life policing in places like New York during the
1990s. Quality of life policing arrests people for
minor offenses like urinating in public, jumping turnstyles, or public drinking (Duneier 1999). The young
men in this study were initially arrested for more serious offenses such as drug offenses, and then were
served warrants when they failed to show up for
court dates during the pretrial and trial, to pay court

344AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Young men worried that they would be picked

up by the police and taken into custody even
when they did not have a warrant out for their
arrest. Those on probation or parole, on house
arrest, and who were going through a trial
expressed concern that they would soon be
picked up and taken into custody for some violation that would come up in the system. Even
those with no pending legal action expressed
concern that the police might find some reason to hold them because of what they had
done, who or what they knew, or what they carried on their person. In this sense, being on the
run covers a range of circumstances. I use the
term to mean anyone whose claim to a life outside of confinement is not secure or legitimate
and who may be taken into custody if they
encounter the authorities. People on the run
make a concerted effort to thwart their discovery and apprehension, as Chuck, age 19, concisely put it in speaking to his 12-year-old
brother:
You hear the law coming, you merk on [run away
from] them niggas. You dont be having time to
think okay, what do I got on me, what they going
to want from me. No, you hear them coming, thats
it, you gone, period. Because whoever they looking for, even if its not you, nine times out of ten
theyll probably book you.

Police, jail, and court language permeates

general conversation. Young men refer to their
girlfriends as Co-Ds (codefendants) and speak
of catching a case (to be arrested and charged
with a crime) when accused of some wrong by
their friends and family. Call List, the term for
the phone numbers of family and friends one is
allowed to call from prison or jail, becomes the
term for ones close friends.
One way to understand the quantity and quality of young mens legal entanglements is to
look at nine members of the group during one
month. In December 2003, Anthony, who was
22 years old and homeless, had a bench warrant
out for his arrest because he had not paid $173
in court fees for a case that had ended the year
before. He had spent nine of the previous 12
months in jail awaiting the decision. Later in the
month, two neighbors who knew that Anthony

fees at the end of the cases, or to follow the dictates

of probation and parole sentences they were issued
after or instead of completing time in jail or prison.

had this bench warrant called the police and got

him arrested because they said he had stolen
three pairs of shoes from them. Shawn, a 21year-old exotic dancer, was in county jail awaiting trial for selling crack, a charge that would
ultimately be dismissed. Chuck, age 18, had a
warrant because he had not paid $225 in court
fees that were due a few weeks after his case for
assault was dismissed. He spent almost his
entire senior year of high school in county jail
awaiting trial on this case.
Reggie, then age 16, and his neighbor Randy,
age 19, had detainers out for violating the terms
of their probation, Randy for drinking and
Reggie for testing positive for marijuana (called
hot piss). Alex, age 22, was serving a probation sentence, and Steve, age 19, was under
house arrest awaiting the completion of a trial
for possession of drugs. Ronny, age 16, was in
a juvenile detention facility, and Mike, age 21,
was in county jail awaiting trial.
Between 2002 and 2007, Mike spent about
three and a half years in jail or prison. Out of
the 139 weeks that he was not incarcerated, he
spent 87 weeks on probation or parole for five
overlapping sentences. He spent 35 weeks with
a warrant out for his arrest, and in total had 10
warrants issued on him. Mike had at least 51
court appearances over this five-year period,
47 of which I attended.
The fact that some young men may be taken
into custody if they encounter the authorities is
a background expectation of everyday interaction in this community. It is a starting principle,
central to understanding young mens relations
to family and friends, as well as the reciprocal
lines of action between them.
PATHS TO PRISON AND STRATEGIES
OF EVASION
Once a man finds that he may be stopped by the
police and taken into custody, he discovers that
people, places, and relations he formerly relied
on, and that are integral to maintaining a
respectable identity, get redefined as paths to
confinement. I am concerned here with the
kinds of relations, localities, and activities that
threaten a wanted mans freedom, with the techniques he commonly employs to reduce these
risks, and with some of the contingencies associated with these techniques.

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO345

HOSPITALS AND JOBS

Alex and his girlfriend, Donna, both age 22,
drove to the hospital for the birth of their son.
I got there a few hours after the baby was born,
in time to see two police officers come into the
room and arrest Alex. He had violated his parole
a few months before by drinking alcohol and had
a warrant out for his arrest. As an officer handcuffed him, Donna screamed and cried, and as
they walked Alex away she got out of the bed
and grabbed hold of him, moaning, Please
dont take him away. Please Ill take him down
there myself tomorrow I swear, just let him stay
with me tonight. The officers told me they had
come to the hospital with a shooting victim
who was in custody and, as was their custom,
ran the names of the men on the visitors list.
Alex came up as having a warrant out for a
parole violation, so they arrested him along
with two other men on the delivery room floor.
After Alex was arrested, other young men
expressed hesitation to go to the hospital when
their babies were born. Soon after Chuck turned
21, his girlfriend, age 22, was due with their second child. Chuck told her that he would go to
the hospital, even though he had a detainer out
for a probation violation for breaking curfew.
Chuck stayed with her until she was driven to
the hospital, but at the final moment he said she
should go ahead without him and that he would
come soon. He sat with me later and discussed
the situation. As we spoke, his girlfriend called
his cell phone repeatedly, and he would mute the
sound after a ring and stare at her picture as it
came up on the screen each time. He said:
I told her I was on my way. She mad as shit I aint
there. I can hear her right now. She going to be like,
You broke your promise. Im not trying to go out
like Alex [get arrested], though. You feel me?

Alex spent a year back upstate on the parole

violation. Just after his sons first birthday he
was re-released on parole, with another year
left to complete it. He resumed work at his
fathers heating and air-conditioning repair shop,
stopped smoking marijuana, and typically came
home before his curfew. Three weeks before
Alex was due to complete his parole sentence,
he was on his way home from 6th Street when
a man with a hooded sweatshirt covering his face
stepped quickly out from behind the side of a
store and walked Alex, with a gun in his back,
into the alley. Alex said the man took his money

and pistol-whipped him three times, then

grabbed the back of his head and smashed his
face into a concrete wall.
Alex called Mike and me to come pick him
up. When we arrived, Alex was searching on the
ground for the three teeth that had fallen out, and
the blood from his face and mouth was streaming down his white T-shirt and onto his pants and
boots. His jaw and nose were swollen and looked
as if they might be broken. I pleaded with him
to go to the hospital. He refused, saying that his
parole officer might hear of it and serve him a
violation for being out past curfew, for fighting,
for drinking, or any other number of infractions.
That night, Alex called his cousin who was
studying to be a nurses assistant to come stitch
up his face. In the morning, he repeated his
refusal to avail himself of medical care:
All the bullshit I done been through [to finish his
parole sentence], its like, Im not just going to
check into emergency and there come the cops asking me all types of questions and writing my information down and before you know it Im back in
there [in prison]. Even if they not there for me some
of them probably going to recognize me then they
going to come over, run my shit [run a check on
his name].|.|.|. I aint supposed to be up there [his
parole terms forbade him to be near 6th Street,
where he was injured]; I cant be out at no two
oclock [his curfew was ten]. Plus they might still
got that little jawn [warrant] on me in Bucks
County [for court fees he did not pay at the end of
a trial two years earlier]. I dont want them running
my name, and then I got to go to court or I get
locked back up.

Alex later found out that the man who beat

him had mistaken him for his brother, who had
apparently robbed him the week before. Alexs
jaw still bothers him and he now speaks with a
kind of muffled lisp, but he did not go back to
prison. Alex was the only member of the group
to successfully complete a probation or parole
sentence during the six years I spent there.
Like hospitals, places of employment become
dangerous for people with a warrant. Soon after
Mike, age 24, was released on parole to a
halfway house, he got a job through an old
friend who managed a Taco Bell. Mike refused
to return to the halfway house in time for curfew one night, saying he could not spend another night cooped up with a bunch of men like he
was still in jail. He slept at his girlfriends house,
and in the morning found that he had been

346AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

issued a violation and would likely be sent back

to prison, pending the judges decision. Mike
said he wasnt coming back and they were going
to have to catch him. Two parole officers arrested him the next day as he was leaving the Taco
Bell. He spent a year back upstate for this violation.
A man with a warrant can get arrested on the
job even if the police are not specifically searching for him. Chuck, who started working at the
local McDonalds when he was 19, was issued
a probation violation for driving a car (his driving privileges had been revoked as part of his
probation sentence). Although he had a warrant,
Chuck kept working, saying that if the police
came he would simply run out the back door.
A couple of weeks later, an old employee
got into a fight with three other employees, and
the police shut down the McDonalds while they
questioned witnesses and looked for the women
who had been fighting. When the fight began,
Chuck was in the storeroom talking on the
phone with his girlfriend. He came out, he said,
and saw six police officers staring at him. At this
point he called and asked me to come and pick
up his house keys, fairly certain he would be
taken into custody. When I got there he was
driving away in the back of the police car.
THE POLICE AND THE COURTS
Like going to work or to hospitals, using the
police and the courts was risky. After Mike
completed a year in prison he was released on
parole to a halfway house. When his mother
went on vacation, he invited a man he met in
prison to her house to play video games. The
next day Mike, Chuck, and I went back and
found his mothers stereo, DVD player, and two
televisions were gone. A neighbor told us he had
seen the man taking these things out of the
house in the early morning.
Mike called the police and gave them a
description of the man. When we returned to the
block, Reggie and Steve admonished Mike
about the risks he had taken:
Reggie: And you on parole! You done got home like
a day ago! Why the fuck you calling the law for?
You lucky they aint just grab [arrest] both of you.
Steve: Put it this way: They aint come grab you
like you aint violate shit, they aint find no other
jawns [warrants] in the computer. Dude aint pop
no fly shit [accused Mike of some crime in an
attempt to reduce his own charges], but simple

fact is you filed a statement, you know what Im

saying, gave them niggas your government [real
name]. Now they got your moms address in the file
as your last known [address], so the next time they
come looking for you they not just going to your
uncles, they definitely going to be through there
[his mothers house].

Mike returned to the halfway house a few

days later and discovered that the guards were
conducting alcohol tests. He left before they
could test him, assuming he would test positive
and spend another year upstate for the violation.
Three days later the police found him at his
mothers house and took him into custody. He
mentioned that he thought their knowledge of
his new address must have come from the time
he reported the robbery.
Using the courts was no less dangerous.
Chuck, age 22, was working in construction. He
had been arguing with his childrens mother for
some months, and she stopped allowing him to
see their two daughters, ages one-and-a-half
and six months. Chuck decided to take her to
court to file for partial custody. At the time,
Chuck was also sending $35 a month to the
city toward payment on tickets he had received
for driving without a license or registration; he
hoped to get into good standing and become
qualified to apply for a drivers license. The
judge said that if he did not meet his payments
on time every month, he would issue a bench
warrant for his arrest,7 and Chuck could work
off the traffic tickets he owed in county jail
(fines and fees can be deducted for every day
spent in custody).
Five months into his case for partial custody
in family court, Chuck lost his job working
construction and stopped making the $35 payments to the city for the traffic tickets. He was
unable to discover whether he had been issued
a warrant. Chuck went to court for the child custody case anyway the next month, and when the
childrens mother said he was a drug dealer and
not fit to get partial custody of their children,
the judge ran his name in the database to see if

7 In Philadelphia, the courts can issue an arrest warrant if a person fails to pay fines for traffic violations
or misses a court date in regard to these violations.
A person can also be imprisoned for failing to pay
moving violation fines (Philadelphia County, 33
Pa.B. Doc. No. 2745 and Pa.B. Doc. No. 03-1110).

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO347

any warrants came up. They did not. Walking

out of the courthouse, Chuck said to me and his
mother:
I wanted to run, but it was no way I was getting out
of thereit was too many cops and guards. But my
shit came back clean, so I guess if they is going to
give me a warrant for the tickets they aint get
around to it yet.

The judge ruled in Chucks favor, and he was

granted visitation on Sundays at a court-supervised daycare site. These visits, Chuck said,
made him anxious: Every time I walk in the
door I wonder, like, is it today? Are they going
to come grab me, like, right out of the daycare?
I can just see [my daughters] face, like, Daddy,
where you going? After a month, Chuck was
allowed to go to the mothers house on the weekends and pick up his daughters. Chuck appeared
thrilled with these visits because he could see
his children without having to interact with the
courts and risk being taken into custody for any
warrant that might come up.
While people on probation or parole may
make tentative use of the police and the courts,
men with warrants typically stay away. During
the first year and a half I spent on 6th Street, I
noted 24 instances in which members of the
group contacted the police when they were
injured, robbed, or threatened. These men were
either in good standing with the courts or had
no pending legal constraints. I did not observe
any person with a warrant call the police or
voluntarily make use of the courts during the six
years I spent there. Indeed, young men with
warrants seemed to see the authorities only as
a threat to their safety. This has two important
implications.
First, steering clear of the police means that
wanted men tend not to use the ordinary
resources of the law to protect themselves from
crimes perpetrated against them. This can lead
a person to become the target of those who are
looking for someone to rob.
Ned, age 43, and his long-time girlfriend
Jean, age 46, lived on Mikes block. Jean was a
heavy crack user, although Chuck noted, she
can handle her drugs, meaning she was able to
maintain both a household and her addiction.
Ned was unemployed and occasionally hosted
dollar parties (house parties with a dollar
entrance fee and with drinks, food, and games
that all cost a dollar) for extra money and
engaged in petty fraud, such as stealing checks

out of the mail and stealing credit cards. Their

primary income came from taking in foster children.
Jason lived on Chucks block and sold marijuana with his younger brother. In January of
2003, the police stopped Jason on a dirt bike and
arrested him for receiving stolen property (they
said the bike came up stolen in California four
years earlier). Jason did not appear for court and
was issued a bench warrant.
Around this time, Ned and Jean discovered
they might be kicked out of their house because
they owed property taxes to the city. Jean called
Jason, telling him to come to the house because
she had some gossip concerning his longtime
love interest. According to Jason, when he
arrived on the porch steps, Jeans nephew robbed
him at gunpoint. That night, Jean acknowledged
to me that she would take this money and pay
some of their bills owed to the city. Reggie later
remarked that Jason should have known not to
go to Ned and Jeans house: as the only man on
the block with a warrant out for his arrest at the
time, he was vulnerable to violence or robbery
because he could not call the police.
Second, wanted peoples inability to turn to
the police when harmed can lead young men to
use violence to protect themselves or to get
back at others. Black (1983) argues that some
crimes can be understood as people taking matters into their own hands, that is, punishing people whom they consider to have committed a
crime. This kind of self-help crime is typically
carried out when the police and the courts are
unavailable (in this case, because people have
warrants out for their arrest and may be held in
custody if they contact the authorities).
One winter morning, Chuck, Mike, and I
were at a diner having breakfast to celebrate the
fact that Mike had not been taken into custody
after his court appearance earlier that morning.
Chucks mother called to tell him that his car had
been firebombed outside her house and that
fire trucks were putting it out. According to
Chuck, the man who set fire to his car was
someone who had given him drugs to sell on
credit, under the arrangement that Chuck would
pay him once he had sold the drugs. Chuck had
not been able to pay because the police had
taken the money out of his pockets when they
searched him earlier that week. This was the first
car that Chuck had ever purchased legally, a
94 Bonneville he had bought the week before

348AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

for $400 from a used-car lot in northeast

Philadelphia. Chuck was silent for the rest of the
meal, and as we walked to Mikes car, he said:
This shit is nutty, man. What the fuck Im supposed
to do, go to the cops? Um, excuse me officer, I
think boy done blown up my whip [car]. He going
to run my name and shit, now he see I got a warrant on me; next thing you know my Black ass
locked the fuck up, you feel me? Im locked up
because a nigga firebombed my whip. What the
fuck, Im supposed to let niggas take advantage?

Chuck and Mike discussed whether it was

better for Chuck to take matters into his own
hands or to do nothing (referred to as letting
it ride or taking an L [loss]). Doing nothing
had the benefit of not placing him in more legal
trouble, but, as they both noted, letting it ride
set them up to be taken advantage of by people
who understood them to be sweet.
A few days later, Chuck drove over to 8th
Street with Mike and Steve and shot at the
young man whom he believed was responsible
for blowing up his car. Although no one was
injured, a neighbor reported the incident and the
police put out a body warrant for Chucks arrest
for attempted murder.
Labeling theory suggests that those accorded a deviant status come to engage in deviance
because of being labeled as such (Becker 1963;
Lemert 1951). This phenomenon is known as
secondary deviance (Lemert 1951:75).
Declining to engage authorities when there may
be concrete reasons for doing so should be considered in this context. Young mens hesitation
to go to the police or to make use of the courts
when they are wronged, because of concern
they will be arrested, means they became the targets of theft and violence because it is assumed
they will not press charges. With the police out
of reach, men then resort to more violence as a
strategy to settle disputes.
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Like going to the hospital or using the police and
the courts, even more intimate relations
friends, family, and romantic partnersmay
pose a threat and thus have to be avoided or at
least carefully navigated. My observations of
Alex made this all too clear. When I met Alex,
age 21, he was on parole and living with his girlfriend Donna. Alex had recently gotten a job at
his fathers heating and air-conditioning repair

shop. After work, he usually went to see his

friends from 6th street, and occasionally he
would stay on the block drinking and talking
until late at night.
Donna and Alex frequently argued over what
time he came home and his drunken condition.
In these fights, I observed that Donna would
threaten to call his parole officer and say that
Alex was in violation if Alex did not return
home at a reasonable hour. Donna also threatened to call the parole officer and tell him that
Alex was out past curfew or associating with
known criminals if he cheated on her, or if he
did not contribute enough of his money to the
household. Because Alex was paroled to
Donnas apartment, she could also threaten to
call the parole office and say that she no longer
wanted Alex to live with her. If this were to
happen, she explained to me, Alex would be
placed in a halfway house.
In the early morning after a party, Mike and
I drove Alex back to Donnas apartment. She
was waiting on the step for him:
Donna: Where the fuck you been at?
Alex: Dont worry about it.
Donna: You must dont want to live here no more.
Alex: Come on, Don. Stop playing.
Donna: Matter of fact Ill give you the choice
[between prison or a halfway house].
Alex: Come on, Don.
Donna: Uhn-uhn, you not staying here no more.
Im about to call your P.O. now, so you better
make up your mind where you going to go.
Alex: Im tired, man, come on, open the door.
Donna: Nigga, the next time Im laying in the bed
by myself thats a wrap [thats the end].

Later that day, Donna called me and listed a

number of reasons why she needed to threaten
Alex:
I cant let that nigga get locked up for some dumb
shit like he gets caught for a DUI or he gets stopped
in a Johnny [a stolen car] or some shit. What the
fuck Im supposed to do? Let that nigga roam
free? And then next thing you know he locked up
and Im stuck here by myself with Omar talking
about Where Daddy at?

Donna stopped short of calling the police on

Alex and seemed to see her threats as necessary
efforts at social control. This use of the criminal justice system as threat can be seen as parallel to the way in which single mothers threaten
to turn fathers over to child-support authorities
if they do not contribute money informally

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO349

(Edin and Lein 1997). I also witnessed women

go a step further and call the police on their
boyfriends or kin to punish them or get back at
them.
Mike and Maries relationship witnessed just
such a tension. They had a son when they were
seniors in high school and a daughter two years
later. When Mike and Marie were 22, and their
children were 1 and 3 years old, Mike began
openly seeing another woman, Tara. Mike
claimed that he and Marie had broken up and
he could do as he wished, but Marie did not
agree to this split and maintained they were
still together and that he was in fact cheating.
(He dont be telling me we not together when
he laying in the bed with me!) Mike provoked
expressions of jealousy (called stunting) as he
began riding past Maries block with Tara on the
back of his ATV motorbike. Marie seemed infuriated at the insult of her childrens father riding through her block with another woman for
all of her family and neighbors to see, and she
told him that he could no longer visit their two
children. Mike and Marie spent many hours on
the phone arguing over this. Mike would plead
with her to let him see the children and she
would explain that he would have to end things
with Tara first.
Tara said she wanted to fight Marie and
almost did so one afternoon. Marie stood outside her house, with six relatives in back of her,
waving a baseball bat and shouting, Get your
kids, bitch. I got mine! (Meaning that she had
more claim to Mike than Tara did because they
shared two children.) One of Taras girlfriends
and I held her back while she took off her earrings and screamed, I got your bitch, bitch!
and Im going to beat the shit out this fat bitch.
One afternoon when Mike was sitting on a
neighbors steps, a squad car pulled up and two
police officers arrested him. He had a bench
warrant out for missing a court date. He said
later that he never even thought to run, assuming the police were there to pick up the men
standing next to him who had recently robbed
a convenience store. As Mike sat in the police
car, Marie talked at him through the window in
a loud voice:
You not just going to dog [publicly cheat on or
humiliate] me! Who the fuck he think he dealing
with? Let that nigga sit for a minute [stay in jail
for a while]. Dont let me catch that bitch up there
either [coming to visit him in jail].

Although Marie did call the cops and get

Mike taken into custody that day, she was the
first person to visit him in county jail after he
got out of quarantine and she continued to visit
him (sometimes wearing a Free Mike T-shirt)
throughout his year-long trial. On the day of his
sentencing, she appeared in the courtroom in a
low-cut top with a large new tattoo of his name
on her chest.
I also observed women use the police and the
courts as a form of direct retaliation. Michelle,
age 16, lived with her aunt on 6th Street. When
Michelle started showing, she claimed that
Reggie (who was 17 at the time) was the father.
Reggie denied he had gotten her pregnant, and
when Michelle said she wanted an abortion, he
refused to help pay for it. Michelles aunt
declared that she and her niece were cutting off
their relationship with Reggie and that he was
no longer welcome in their house. Michelle
threatened to have Reggie beaten up by various
young men she was involved with. Reggie typically stood on the corner only two houses away
from where they lived, and this became a frequent verbal conflict.
Around the same time, a newcomer to the
block and to the group shot and killed a man
from 4th Street during a dice game. The slain
mans associates (his boys) began driving up
and down 6th Street and shooting at Reggie,
Chuck, and Steve. On one of these occasions,
Reggie fired two shots back as their car sped
away; these bullets hit Michelles house, breaking the glass in the front windows and lodging
in the living room walls. Although the bullets
did not hit anyone, Michelle was home, and
called her aunt, who called the police. She told
them that Reggie had shot at her niece, and the
police put out a body warrant for his arrest for
attempted murder.
After five weeks, the police found Reggie
hiding in a shed and took him into custody.
Reggies mother and his brother Chuck tried to
talk Michelle and her aunt out of showing up in
court so that the charges would be dropped and
Reggie could come home.8 From jail, Reggie
called his mother and me repeatedly to discuss

8 This is a fairly common thing to do. Some people get others arrested simply to extort money from
them, which they request in exchange for not showing up as a witness at the ensuing trial.

350AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

the situation. Once when we were both on the

line he said:
Reggie: The bitch [Michelles aunt] know I wasnt shooting at them. She know we going through
it right now [are in the middle of a series of
shootouts with men from another block]. Why Im
going to shoot at two females that live on my
block? She know I wasnt shooting at them.
Mother: What you need to do is call her up and
apologize [for not taking responsibility for her
nieces pregnancy].
Reggie: True, true.

Reggie did apologize and spread the word that

he was responsible for making Michelle pregnant. Michelle and her aunt did not show up at
three consecutive court dates, and after six
months the case for attempted murder was
dropped and Reggie came home. Michelles
aunt seemed pleased with this result:
You not just going to get my niece pregnant, then
you talking about its not yours, you know what Im
saying? Fuck out of here, no.|.|.|. I mean, I wasnt
trying to see that nigga sit for an attempt [get convicted of attempted murder], but he needed to sit
for a little while. He got what he needed to get. He
had some time to sit and think about his actions,
you dig me? He done got what he needed to get.

While family members, partners, or friends

of a wanted man occasionally call the police on
him to control his behavior or to punish him for
a perceived wrong, close kin or girlfriends also
link young men to the police because the police
compel them to do so. It is common practice for
the police to put pressure on friends, girlfriends,
and family members to provide information,
particularly when these people have their own
warrants, are serving probation or parole, or
have a pending trial. Family members and
friends who are not themselves caught up in the
justice system may be threatened with eviction
or with having their children taken away if they
do not provide information about the young
men in their lives.
Reggie, age 17, was stopped by the police for
loitering on the corner and allowed the police
to search him. When the police officer discovered three small bags of crack in the lining of
his jeans, Reggie started running. The cops lost
him in the chase, and an arrest warrant was
issued for possession of drugs with intent to distribute.
Reggie told me that the police raided his
house the next night at 3:00 a.m. He left through

the back door and ran through the alley before

they could catch him. The officers came back
the next night, breaking open the front door
(which remains broken and unlocked to this
day), and ordered Reggies younger brother and
his grandfather to lie facedown on the floor
with their hands on their heads while they
searched the house. An off icer promised
Reggies mother that if she gave up her son,
they would not tell Reggie she had betrayed
him. If she did not give Reggie up, he said he
would call child protective services and have her
younger son taken away because the house was
infested with roaches, covered in cat shit, and
unfit to live in.
I was present two nights later when the police
raided the house for the third time. An officer
mentioned they were lucky the family owned the
house: if it was a Section 8 building they could
be immediately evicted for endangering their
neighbors and harboring a fugitive. (Indeed, I
had seen this happen recently to two other families.) The police found a gun upstairs that
Reggies mother could not produce a permit
for; they cuffed her and took her to the police
station. When her youngest son and I picked her
up that afternoon, she said they told her she
would be charged for the gun unless she told
them where to find Reggie.
Reggies mother begged him to turn himself
in, but Reggie refused. His grandfather, who
owned the house, told Reggies mother that he
would no longer allow her to live there with her
kids if she continued to hide her son from the
police:
This aint no damn carnival. I dont care who he
is, Im not letting nobody run through this house
with the cops chasing him, breaking shit, spilling
shit, waking me up out of my sleep. Im not with
the late night screaming and running. I open my
eyes and I see a nigga hopping over my bed trying to crawl out the window. Hell no! Like I told
Reggie, if the law run up in here one more time I
be done had a stroke. Reggie is a grown-ass man
[he was 17]. He aint hiding out in my damn house.
We going to fuck around and wind up in jail with
this shit. They keep coming they going to find
some reason to book my Black ass.

Reggies grandfather began calling the police

when he saw Reggie in the house, and Reggies
mother told him that he could no longer stay
there. For two months, Reggie lived in an abandoned Buick LeSabre parked in a nearby alleyway. Reggies mother said she missed her son

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO351

and felt she had betrayed him by abandoning

him, even though she had not turned him in to
the police. When the police finally took Reggie
into custody, she expressed relief:
Well, at least he dont have to look over his shoulder anymore, always worried that the law was
going to come to the house. He was getting real
sick of sleeping in the car. It was getting cold outside, you know, and plus Reggie is a big boy and
his neck was all cramped up [from sleeping in the
car].|.|.|. And he used to come to the back like: Ma,
make me a plate, and then hed come back in 20
minutes and Id pass him the food from out the window.

Whether a mans friends, relatives, or girlfriend link him to the authorities because the
police pressure them to do so or because they
leverage his wanted status to get back at him or
punish him, he comes to see those closest to him
as potential informants. Mike and Chuck once
discussed how they stood the highest chance of
getting booked because of their friends and
relatives attempts to set them up. Mike noted:
Nine times out of ten, you getting locked up
because somebody called the cops, somebody
snitching. Thats why, like, if you get a call from
your girl like, Yo, where you at, can you come
through the block at a certain time, thats a red
flag, you feel me? Thats when you start to think
like, Okay, what do she got waiting for me?

I observed wanted men try to reduce the

chance of their intimates informing by cultivating secrecy and unpredictability. Chuck and
Reggie referred to this strategy as dipping and
dodging or ducking in and out. Chuck, age
20, remarked:
The night is really, like, the best time to do whatever you got to do. If I want to go see my mizz
[mother], see my girl, come through the block and
holla at [say hello to] my boys I cant be out in
broad day. I got to move like a shadow, you know,
duck in and out, you thought you saw me, then
bam, Im out before you even could see what I was
wearing or where I was going.

When Steve, age 19, had a bench warrant

out for failure to appear in court, he was determined, he said, never to go back to jail. He slept
in a number of houses, not staying more than a
few nights in any one place. On the phone, he
would lie to his family members, girlfriend, and
fellow block members about where he was staying and where he planned to go next. If he got
a ride to where he was sleeping, he requested to

be dropped off a few blocks away, and then

waited until the car was out of sight before
walking inside. For six months, nobody on the
block seemed to know where Steve was sleeping.
Cultivating unpredictability helps wanted
men reduce the risk of friends and family
informing on them. In fact, maintaining a secret
and unpredictable routine decreases the chance
of arrest by many of the other paths discussed
previously. It is easier for the police to find a person through his last known address if he comes
home at around the same time to the same house
every day. Finding a person at work is easier if
he works a regular shift in the same place every
day. Cultivating secrecy and unpredictability,
then, serve as a general strategy to avoid confinement.
BEING WANTED AS A MEANS OF
ACCOUNTING
Once a man is wanted, maintaining a stable
routine, being with his partner and family, going
to work, and using the police may link him to
the authorities and lead to his confinement. Yet
when wanted men (or social analysts) imply
that being wanted is the root cause of their
inability to lead respectable lives, they are
stretching: long before the rise in imprisonment, urban ethnographers described the distrust
that Black people felt toward the police and
one another, and the difficulties poor Black
men faced in finding work and participating in
the lives of their families (Anderson 1999;
Cayton and Drake [1945] 1993; DuBois [1899]
1996; Duneier 1999; Edin and Lein 1997;
Liebow 1967; Newman 1999; Stack 1974).
While legal entanglements may exacerbate these
difficulties, being wanted also serves as a way
to save face and to explain inadequacies.
Liebow (1967:116) wrote that the unemployed men he spent time with accounted for
their failures with the theory of manly flaws.
For example, instead of admitting that their
marriages failed because they could not support
their spouses, they explained that they were too
manly to be good husbandsthey could not
stop cheating, or drinking, or staying out late.
For the young men of 6th Street, being on the
run takes the place of, or at least works in concert with, the manly flaws described by

352AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Liebow as a means to retain self respect in the

face of failure.
Mike, age 21, had a bench warrant out
because he did not show up to court for a hearing in a drug possession case. During this time,
he was not making what he considered to be
decent money selling drugs, and he had been
unable to pay his sons Catholic school fees for
more than a month. Parents Day at his sons
school that year was a Thanksgiving fair, and
Mike had been talking about the day for weeks.
The night before the fair, Mike agreed to pick
up his childrens mother, Marie, and go to the
school around 10:00 the next morning.
The next morning, Marie began calling
Mikes cell phone at 8:30. She called around 13
times between 8:30 and 9:30. I asked Mike why
he did not pick up and he said that it was not safe
to go, considering the warrant. At noon, he
finally answered her call. By then the fair was
almost over and Marie had caught the bus back
and forth herself. She was yelling so loudly that
Steve, Chuck, and I could hear her voice through
the phone:
What the fuck good are you on the streets if you
cant even come to your sons fair? Why I got to
do everything myselftake him to school, pick
him up from school, take him to the doctor.|.|.|. And
you on some Im falling back. Im laying low. I
cant be up at no school. I cant do this I cant do
that. What the fuck Im supposed to tell your
son: Michael, Daddy cant come to the fair today
because the cops is looking for him and we dont
want him to get booked. Is that what you want me
to say?

Mike called her some names and hung up.

Before going back to sleep, he mentioned what
a dumb-ass she was:
Do she want me to get locked up? How Im going
to be there for my kids if Im locked up? She dont
be thinking, like, she dont have to look over her
shoulder, you know what Im saying. She be forgetting I cant just do whatever I want, go wherever I want.

Mike seemed convinced that going to the

fair would put him at risk, and at the time I
believed this to be the reason he stayed home.
But a few months later, although he was still
wanted for the same bench warrant, he attended a parentteacher conference.
Alice: I thought you didnt want to go up there.
Remember Marie was mad as shit the other time
you didnt go.

Mike: Im cool now because I just paid the school

fees. I aint want dude to come at my neck [get
angry], like, Where the money at? Why you aint
pay? I wasnt trying [didnt want] to hear that bullshit.

From this, I gathered that Mike had not gone

to Parents Day earlier in the year at least in part
because he had not paid the school fees and
did not want to confront the schools administration. Once he paid the bill, he proudly attended the next event, a parentteacher conference.
The warrant provided him with a way to avoid
going to Parents Day without admitting that he
did not want to go because he could not pay the
school fees.
Warrants also serve as an important explanation for not having a job. Steve had a warrant
out for a few weeks when he was 21, and repeatedly mentioned how he could not get work
because of this warrant:
If I had a whip [car] Id go get me a job up King
of Prussia [a mall in a neighboring county] or
whatever. But I cant work nowhere in Philly. Thats
where niggas be fucking up. You remember when
Jason was at McDonalds? He was like, No, they
[the police] aint going to see me, Im working in
the back. But you cant always be back there,
like sometimes they put you at the counter, like if
somebody dont show up, you know what I mean?
How long he worked there before they [the police]
came and got him? Like a week. They was like,
Um, can I get a large fry and your hands on the
counter because your Black ass is booked! And
he tried to run like shit, too, but they was outside
the jawn [the restaurant] four deep [four police officers were outside] just waiting for him to try that
shit.

Although Steve now and then invoked his

warrant as an explanation for his unemployment, the fact was that Steve did not secure a job
during the six years I knew him, including the
times when he did not have a warrant.
James, age 18, moved with his aunt to 6th
Street, and after a while became Reggies
young-boy. Like the other guys, he talked
about his court cases or mentioned that he had
to go see his probation officer.
Steve, Mike, Chuck, and I were sitting on
Chucks back-porch steps one afternoon when
Reggie drove up the alley way and announced:
Yo, the boy James he clean, dog! He aint got
no warrant, no detainer, nothing. He dont even
got like a parking ticket in his name.

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO353

Reggie told us he had just been to Jamess

mothers house across town, and she had complained to him that James had not yet found a
job. Jamess mother informed Reggie that James
had no pending cases, no warrants or detainers
or anything in the system that would hold him
and so should have no problem finding employment. When Reggie finished explaining this to
us, Mike continued the conversation:
Mike: What happened to that case he caught?
Damn that was a little minute ago [a while ago].
Chuck: I think he spanked that jawn [the case was
dropped].
Reggie: I wish I would get my shit [warrant] lifted. Id be bam, on my J-O [job], bam, on my A-P
[apartment], bam, go right to the bank, like, Yeah,
motherfucker, check my shit, man. Run that shit.
My shit is clean, dog. Let me get that account. I
be done got my elbow [drivers license] and everything.

Reggie explained how his wanted status

blocks him from getting jobs, using banks,
obtaining a drivers license, and renting an apartment. Yet the things that Reggie thought a
clean person should do were not things that
Reggie himself did when he was in good standing with the authorities over the course of the
years that I knew him. Nor were they things that
most of the other men on the block did. Alex,
Mike, and Chuck looked for jobs when they
did not have warrants out for their arrest, but
others, like Reggie and Steve, did not. None of
them obtained a valid drivers license during
the six years I knew them.9 Only Mike secured
his own apartment during this time, and he kept
it for only three months. To my knowledge,
none of the men established a bank account.
Being wanted serves as an excuse for a wide
variety of unfulfilled obligations and expectations. At the same time, it is perhaps only
because being wanted is in fact a constraining
condition that it works so well as a means of

Obtaining a drivers license requires a birth certificate or passport, a Social Security card, and two
proofs of residence. Obtaining these items, in turn,
requires identification and processing fees. One must
undergo a physical exam by a doctor, pay for and pass
a written permit test, and locate an insured and registered car with which to take the driving test. Because
men drove without proper documentation, they got
tickets, which had to be paid before they could begin
the application process.

accounting for failure. Having a warrant may not

be the reason why Steve, for example, did not
look for work, but it was a fact that police officers did go to a mans place of work to arrest
him, and that some of the men experienced this
first-hand. In the context of their ongoing struggles, what they said amounted to reasonable
half-truths (Liebow 1967) that could account
for their failures, both in their own minds and
in the minds of others who had come to see their
own lives in similar terms.
DISCUSSION
The presence of the criminal justice system in
the lives of the poor cannot simply be measured
by the number of people sent to prison or the
number who return home with felony convictions. Systems of policing and supervision that
accompanied the rise in imprisonment have fostered a climate of fear and suspicion in poor
communitiesa climate in which family members and friends are pressured to inform on one
another and young men live as suspects and
fugitives, with the daily fear of confinement.
Young men who are wanted by the police
find that activities, relations, and localities that
others rely on to maintain a decent and
respectable identity are transformed into a system that the authorities make use of to arrest and
confine them. The police and the courts become
dangerous to interact with, as does showing up
to work or going to places like hospitals. Instead
of a safe place to sleep, eat, and find acceptance
and support, mothers homes are transformed
into a last known address, one of the first
places the police will look for them. Close relatives, friends, and neighbors become potential
informants.
One strategy for coping with these risks is to
avoid dangerous places, people, and interactions entirely. A young man thus does not attend
the birth of his child, nor seek medical help
when he is badly beaten. He avoids the police
and the courts, even if it means using violence
when he is injured or becoming the target of others who are looking for someone to rob. A second strategy is to cultivate unpredictabilityto
remain secretive and to dip and dodge. To
ensure that those close to him will not inform
on him, a young man comes and goes in irregular and unpredictable ways, remaining elusive
and untrusting, sleeping in different beds, and

354AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

deceiving those close to him about his whereabouts and plans. If a man exhausts these possibilities and gets taken into custody, he may try
to avoid jail time by informing on the people he
knows.
Whatever the strategy, a man finds that as
long as he is at risk of confinement, staying
out of prison and participating in institutions like
family, work, and friendship become contradictory goals; doing one reduces his chance of
achieving the other. Staying out of jail becomes
aligned not with upstanding, respectable action,
but with being an even shadier character.
Family members and romantic partners experience considerable hardship because of their
association with men who are being sought or
supervised by the state. Specifically, I found that
family members living with a relative or
boyfriend with a warrant out for his arrest are
caught between three difficult lines of action:
allowing him to stay in their homes and placing
their own safety and security in jeopardy, casting him out, or betraying him by turning him in
to the police.
It is possible that issuing warrants to a large
group of young men for minor probation violations or delinquencies with court fees, while
straining family life and making it difficult for
men to find and keep a job, also serves to discourage them from committing crime. Although
this article notes some instances of warrants
potentially encouraging crime (e.g., by keeping
men from participating in the formal labor market or by leading men with warrants to become
the target of robbers), I cannot speculate as to
the net effect of such policies on crime or violence. The data presented here merely suggest
that current policies in Philadelphia grant a sizable group of peoplebefore they are convicted of crimes and after they have served a
sentencean illegal or semilegal status, and
that this status makes it difficult for them to
interact with legitimate institutions without
being arrested and sent to jail.
More surprisingly, the system of low-level
warrants and court supervision has the unintended consequence of becoming a resource
for women and relatives who, possessing more
legal legitimacy, can use it to control their partners and kin. Girlfriends, neighbors, and family members threaten to call the police on young
men to keep them in line, and occasionally
they call the police or get a man arrested as

payback for some perceived wrong. Young men

also turn their wanted status into a resource by
using it to account for shortcomings or failures
that may have occurred anyway. Because being
wanted is understood by 6th Street residents to
be deeply constraining, young men with little
income, education, or job prospects can call on
their wanted status to save face and to assuage
the guilt of failing as a father, romantic partner,
or employed person.
Contemporary theories of social stratification
and political sociology argue that the criminal
justice system has become a vehicle for passing on disadvantage (Western 2006) and an
instrument for the management of dispossessed
and dishonored groups (Wacquant 2001:95).
The findings presented here confirm these
important theses, but my fieldwork also suggests
that those so managed are hardly hapless victims, immobilized in webs of control. Instead,
men and women on 6th Street evade and resist
the authorities, at times calling on the state for
their own purposes, to make claims for themselves as honorable people, and to exercise
power over one another.
CONCLUSIONS AND THEORETICAL
IMPLICATIONS
Young men on the run in Philadelphia can tell
us something about how power operates in contemporary society. Indeed, the policing of the
modern ghetto may be usefully juxtaposed to the
influential theory of power Foucault outlines
in Discipline and Punish (for discussions of
Foucaults dominant position in the sociology of
punishment see Cohen 1985; Garland 1990).
Foucaults (1979) theory of power begins
with the prison and extends to work houses,
almshouses, military barracks, cities under tight
regulation during cholera epidemics, and finally to modern society. He argues that popular illegalities were widespread in early modern
society, and sovereigns made no systematic
attempts to stamp them out. Instead, sovereigns
intervened sporadically, making gruesome public examples of a small number of cases. Taking
the prison as an example, Foucault suggests
that modern punishment is organized not on
the principle of occasional fear-inspiring public brutality, but on a panoptic system of inspection, surveillance, and graded rewards and
punishments. The law is enforced systemati-

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO355

cally: individuals are carefully monitored and

examined and files are kept on them. The age
of popular illegality is replaced by the age of
rational discipline.
At first glance, the Philadelphia neighborhood I studied, with its video cameras on street
lamps, frequent police stops and searches, and
monitoring of residents through probation,
parole, and house arrest, seems to resemble the
panoptic fortress town Foucault envisioned in
Discipline and Punish (1979). Yet the ghetto
cannot be placed under the general umbrella of
the panopticon. A different form of power exists
there, and with different results for the people
involved.
Foucault suggests that in prisons, army
camps, and other such panoptic places, authorities accomplish cooperation through constant,
uninterrupted supervision and a system of
graded punishments and rewards. People are
coaxed into compliance through careful training, examining, and monitoring, through minute
attention to the movements and gestures of the
body. Eventually, subjects come to internally
monitor themselves (Garland 2001).
In comparison to places like prisons, monasteries, or army camps, the monitoring and supervision of ghetto residents is incomplete.
Enclosed spaces make near perfect surveillance
and enforcement possible: people can live
unlawfully only if they do not get caught or if
the authorities look the other way (Sykes [1958]
2007). In spaces like the 6th street neighborhood, however, many people break the law without the authorities knowing; many others are
known to be in violation but the authorities do
not have the resources or the ability (or, to be
more cynical, the desire) to locate them all and
bring them to justice. This opens up the possibility of people existing in the spaces between
identification, discovery, and apprehension.
Surveillance and supervision in the ghetto are
incomplete not only because people are widely able to break the rules and to evade the authorities, but also because the forms of supervision
do not strive to be all-encompassing in the first
place. Residents of the neighborhood I studied
do not find that their movements are tightly
controlled and regimented, as they would be in
a prison or convent; they do not eat, sleep, and
live together under the watchful gaze of one
central authority, nor is their privacy and personal property permanently denied them

(Foucault 1979; Goffman 1961; Sykes [1958]

2007). Supervision around 6th street is not
based on constant observation and disciplining, but on a kind of checkpoint or flashpoint
system, whereby certain people are only occasionally (if not randomly) monitored, searched,
observed, or dispossessed.
These occasional examinations (the urine
test during a probation meeting, the stop and
frisk on a street corner, the raid of a house, or
the running of a drivers name in the police
database to see if any warrants come up) are put
to use notas Foucault envisionedto dole
out a range of small punishments and rewards
in the interest of correction and training, but to
identify people who may qualify for prison and
to bring those people into the hands of the state.
This form of poweroccasional, incomplete,
and for the purpose of identifying candidates for
extreme sanctiondoes not seem to produce
orderly subjects. Self-discipline and the internalization of norms makes little sense in a context in which following the rules (e.g., appearing
in court, showing up to probation meetings, or
turning oneself in when accused) may hasten
ones removal to prison.
A final point of comparison: Foucault argues
that power based on fear (the public hangings)
was replaced in the modern era by power based
on observation, examination, and discipline. In
the 6th street neighborhood, one indeed finds
monitoring and supervision, but this monitoring does not put an end to fear. In fact, the lives
of residents are organized precisely around fear,
that is, the fear of being sent to jail.
Garland (1990:168) argues that a significant
failing of Discipline and Punish is that it
describes the control potential possessed by
modern power-knowledge technologies as if it
were the reality of their present-day operation.
By studying the ghetto ethnographically, we
can see how the forms of power Foucault envisioned operating in a panopticon actually pan
out when applied to a neighborhood. People in
the modern policed ghetto do not live as tightly controlled and disciplined subjects. Rather,
they are living as semilegal or illegal people,
coping with the daily threat of capture and confinement. The life of a suspect or a fugitive is
quite different from the life of a captive, even
though broadly speaking, the same forms of
powerobservation, examination, the keeping
of filesmay sustain them both.

356AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

One can of course argue that wanted people,

poised to perpetuate their own criminality, have
indeed internalized the norms that disciplining
powers sought to instill. In this sense, a status
group of fugitives fits nicely into Foucaults
functionalist ideas about the production of delinquency and its political uses (Foucault
1979:272). But to argue this is, I believe, a
stretch. Fugitives are, in point of fact, resisting
the will of the authorities, and whether or not
this resistance is in the end liberatory, their
daily lives and the forms of power governing
them are clearly distinct from those of inmates
subject to panoptic power.
Rather than placing the ghetto, along with the
rest of society, under a generalized panopticism (Garland 1990:146), the 6th street situation suggests an alternative form of power. In
cases where a state (or some other power) is in
the business of severely sanctioning a group of
people (e.g., by killing them, deporting them,
forcibly sending them to war, or placing them
in institutions like prisons, concentration camps,
or plantations) we will see one group of people
who are charged with administering the sanction and another group who are receiving it. If
the sanction is confinement in a prison, workhouse, or mental asylum, we may see a group
of people living as inmates or subjects as
described by Foucaults panopticon (or in the
way that Sykes [1958] (2007) described people
living in prisons or Goffman [1961] described
people living in total institutions). But we will
also see, outside of these institutions, an apparatus charged with identifying, catching, and
judging likely candidates, and a group of people living with the risk of sanction and trying to
avoid it, as fugitives.
Instead of thinking of residents of the modern ghetto as inmates of prisons or other panoptic places, we might compare ghetto residents
to other semilegal or illegal people who qualify for some sanction and who are trying to avoid
it: undocumented immigrants who are at risk of
being deported, Jews living in Nazi Germany
who may be sent to concentration camps, draftdodgers or deserters from the army who may be
imprisoned or shot, escaped slaves who may
be found and sent back to the plantations, or
communists in the United States and Europe
when the party was illegal. It is with these
groups that residents of the modern ghetto may
find some common experience. It is this kind of

social situation that should be taken into account

if we are to fully grasp the effects of policies like
mass incarceration.
Alice Goffman is a PhD Candidate in the Sociology
Department at Princeton University.

REFERENCES
Anderson, Elijah. 1978. A Place on the Corner.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
. 1999. Code of the Street. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free
Press.
Beckett, Katherine. 1997. Making Crime Pay. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Black, Donald. 1983. Crime as Social Control.
American Sociological Review 48(1):3245.
Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Cayton, Horace and St. Clair Drake. [1945] 1993.
Black Metropolis. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Cohen, Stanley. 1985. Visions of Social Control.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Comfort, Megan. 2007. Punishment Beyond the
Legal Offender. Annual Review of Law and Social
Science 3:27196.
. 2008. Doing Time Together. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
DuBois, W. E. B. [1899] 1996. The Philadelphia
Negro. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Edin, Kathryn and Laura Lein. 1997. Making Ends
Meet. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New
York: Vintage.
Garland, David. 1990. Punishment and Modern
Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
. 2001. Introduction: The Meaning of Mass
Imprisonment. Pp. 13 in Mass Imprisonment:
Social Causes and Consequences, edited by D.
Garland. London, UK: Sage.
Glaze, Lauren and Thomas Bonzcar. 2006. Probation
and Parole in the United States, 2005. Bureau of
Justice Statistics Bulletin. U.S. Department of
Justice, NCJ 215091. Retrieved March 2009
(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ppus05.pdf).
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. New York: Anchor
Books.
Hagan, John and Ronit Dinovitzer. 1999. Collateral
Consequences of Imprisonment for Children,
Communities, and Prisoners. Crime and Justice
26:12162.
Hammett, Theodore M., Mary P. Harmon, and
William Rhodes. 2002. The Burden of Infectious

WANTED MEN IN A PHILADELPHIA GHETTO357

Disease among Inmates of and Releasees from

U.S. Correctional Facilities, 1997. American
Journal of Public Health 92(11):178994.
Jacobs, Bruce. 1999. Dealing Crack. Boston, MA:
Northeastern University Press.
LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole. 2003. Random Family. New
York: Scribner.
Liebow, Elliot.1967. Tallys Corner. Boston, MA:
Little, Brown.
Newman, Katherine. 1999. No Shame in My Game.
New York: Vintage and Russell Sage.
Nurse, Anne. 2002. Fatherhood Arrested. Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Pager, Devah. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and
Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Pettit, Becky and Bruce Western. 2004. Mass
Imprisonment and the Life-Course: Race and Class
Inequality in U.S. Incarceration. American
Sociological Review 69:15169.
Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department.
2007. 2006 Annual Report. Retrieved March 2009
(http://fjd.phila.gov/pdf/report/2006appd.pdf).
Reiss, Albert J. 1992. Police Organization in the
20th Century. Crime and Justice 15:5197.
Rubenstein, Gwen and Debbie Mukamal. 2002.
Welfare and Housing-Denial of Benefits to Drug
Offenders. Pp. 3749 in Invisible Punishment:
The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Imprisonment, edited by M. Mauer and M.
Chesney-Lind. New York: New Press.
Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing through Crime.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin. New York: Harper
Colophon Books.

Sykes, Gresham. [1958] 2007. Society of Captives.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Uggen, Chris and Jeff Manza. 2002. Democratic
Contradiction? Political Consequences of Felon
Disenfranchisement in the United States.
American Sociological Review 67(6):777803.
United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau
of Investigation. September 2007. Crime in the
United States, 2006. Retrieved March 2, 2009
(http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/arrests/).
Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2006. Off the Books. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
. 2008. Gang Leader for a Day. New York:
Penguin Press.
Wacquant, Loc. 2001. Deadly Symbiosis: When
Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh. Punishment
& Society 3(1):95133.
. 2004. Body and Soul. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in
America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Western, Bruce, Leonard Lopoo, and Sara
McLanahan. 2004. Incarceration and the Bonds
between Parents in Fragile Families. Pp. 2145 in
Imprisoning America, edited by M. Patillo, D.
Weiman, and B. Western. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Wildeman, Christopher. 2009. Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of
Childhood Disadvantage. Demography 46:
26580.
Williams, Terry. 1992. Crackhouse. Reading, MA:
Addison Wesley.